June 3 to July 16 2016
600 Washington Square South (at South 6th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 629 1000

A day in the life of a dying metropolis: At noon, a building collapses under glaring sunlight. At dusk, an orange glow washes over an overgrown rail viaduct. At dawn, banners flutter in from every direction, carrying a cryptic message to the city’s empty streets. Suddenly, flying shards of material adhere to the sides of a crumbling warehouse, resurrecting it as a luxury loft. Such is the transformation that artist Tim Portlock depicts in his video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4 (2013), from the exhibition “Ash and Gold,” at Locks Gallery. It is a transformation one sees in cities throughout the United States, in which whole neighborhoods disintegrate and new development takes root at the blink of an eye.

Bookending Portlock’s video are two bodies of prints that blend photography and computer rendering, one based on blighted scenery from the East Coast, the other on similar landscape in the West. The older prints show a city derived from, but not identical to, Philadelphia. Salon (2011) overlooks a dramatic V-corner, denuded of most of its structures and populated by wild dogs. Abandoned factories loom in the background, and behind them a structure that resembles Philadelphia’s massive city hall clock tower — topped not by the statue of founder William Penn, but a hulking figure that might be a staggering corpse from The Walking Dead.

Anyone who has travelled to Philadelphia by rail will find this desolation familiar. Yet Salon is not one site in particular but a distillation of Philadelphia scenes, and by his own admission, the artist has omitted certain objects and inserted others to capture what he considers to be the city’s essence. Portlock has been deliberate about the alignment of details, putting, for example, the sun’s glowing fireball directly behind the menacing clock tower statue in — much the way Thomas Cole cast dramatic sunlight on figures locked in struggle in his 1836 painting Course of Empire: Destruction.

Although his images depict a cycle of decline and gentrification unique to today’s city, Portlock has stated that they are inspired by the 19th-century American landscape art of painters like Cole. Those Hudson River artists also manipulated the scenes they painted in order to embed in the landscape a deeper vision of the American character. They bathed mountains, rivers, and wild animals in a quasi-religious sunlight, identifying nature with broad themes such as sin, redemption, harmony and conflict.

If Portlock’s Philadelphia scenes are like a painted 19th-century jeremiad, his West Coast prints are more like the thin rants of a modern-day religious television show. Many are based on San Bernardino, California, where the washed out colors of the Mojave Desert create a relentlessly even light. Instead of color cast from the sun, the artist uses the artificial colors of signage and advertising to create visual drama. In Yellow Dancer (2015), for example, he inserts a deflated acid-yellow AirDancer in the foreground. Collapsed over a wire, the figure’s deformity, coupled with its artificially happy hue, embodies a void more profound than that of Philadelphia’s decay.

The AirDancer is the closest thing to a human presence in any of Portlock’s work. The artist has said that he omits the figure in order to avoid the tendency, seen in much realist art, to show people as embodiments of their victimhood rather than depicting them as human beings in full. Instead he draws attention to the forces that create such forlorn scenes. Like the fluttering banners in the video 11th_St_City_Symphony.mp4, the Air Dancers also serve as metaphor for the weightless condition of U.S. cities, in which stone, steel and asphalt float on the worthless paper of land deeds and advertisements. The trail of false promises these documents embody enables a landscape of endless freedom, and also of endless emptiness.

The post Death and Resurrection in the City: Tim Portlock at Locks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

February 5 to April 27, 2016
1071 5th Avenue (at 88th Street)
New York, 212 423 3500

Lying limp on the Guggenheim Museum’s lower landing, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s empty rat and panda costumes nicely encapsulate the pathetic silliness found in much of their work. The title of this retrospective, “How to Work Better,” encompasses the kind of sly, self-deprecating humor about everyday activity for which the pair became known through their 33-year collaboration. In the presences of the empty costumes, it has an air of regret about it — as a driver cursing her broken down car: “maybe next time you’ll learn ‘how to work better.’”

Most notably, “How to Work Better” is a statement about the artists’ decades-long “learning by doing” approach to making art, in which self-study leads to aesthetic wholeness. Their approach echoes the position taken by John Dewey and his Pragmatist cohort — in opposition to René Descartes — that thinking can never be divorced from being. To know the truth of a proposition, we need to test it out in the real world.

The pair began investigating the stuff of everyday life in their 1979 Sausage series. This collection of photos shows amateurish dioramas of ordinary situations, often with sausage as a building material. The Accident, for example, depicts a collision of sausage cars, while The Carpet Shop uses sliced lunchmeat to represent stacked rugs. Fischli and Weiss’s supermarket creations are a deflating tweak to the self-important abstraction and high conceptualism that was the hallmark of that era.

The artists take another poke at profundity in Order and Cleanliness (1981). Consisting of a series of hand-lettered sheets, this work is a taxonomy of opposed but not fully opposite ideas, laid out in every type of graphic format: Venn diagrams, figure eights, Möbius strips. The pages of this textbook of higher truths are, on closer inspection, full of digressions and non-sequiturs. “Cops,” “students,” and “musicians,” lie on a continuum from stupidity to light, while a tree of technological innovations appears inexplicably next to a smaller tree of love. Mildly entertaining though it is, this presentation is neither orderly nor clean. It effectively dismisses the idea that separating information into pure categories has any purpose.

The attempt to systematize knowledge results in full-blown chaos in Suddenly this Overview (1981/2006). With its 200 unfired clay vignettes, mostly rendered in a child-like way, this sprawling work is like one person’s random perusal of Wikipedia. Subjects include zoology (“Hippopotamus,” “Rhizome”), history (“The Landing of the Allies in Normandy“), moments ascribed to historical figures (“Nero Enjoying the View of Rome Burning”) or to prehistoric ones (“Dog of the Inventor of the Wheel Feels the Enjoyment of his Master”), or to proverbial ones (“Strangers in the Night Exchanging Glances”). There is the occasional mathematical abstraction (“Endless Loop”), which gets equal billing with the expression of childish contempt for learning (“Hooray the School is Burning”).

Casting the artists in their own nonsensical vignette is the 1980-81 video The Least Resistance, in which the pair makes a whirlwind tour of Los Angeles on a quest to make a movie. The video’s high drama, which includes a helicopter flight accompanied by triumphant music, is undercut by the fact that the two are donning the same rat and panda costumes on display at the beginning of the exhibition.

In spite of the riotous fun these artists make of the self-consciously profound, there is a seriousness to this work and a visual quietude to its outward appearance. The bulk of the exhibition is in black, white and gray, and many of the works are very unfunny copies of mundane objects. Walls, Corners, Tubes (2009-12) consists of large-scale three-dimensional forms in black rubber and gray unfired clay, which resemble the pieces used to build a sewer. These are displayed next to a video of a seemingly endless journey through just such a place, Kanal Video (1992), which was shot in the Zürich sewer system. Works like these are as focused as Suddenly this Overview is distracting. It’s not so much that Fischli and Weiss are on a hunt for the chaotically absurd, it’s that they encounter it as a matter of course during their trip through the everyday.

In a world where one has to travel to the sewer to experience mathematically perfect forms, Fischli and Weiss’s investigations make a lot of sense. Their dogged insistence on repeating what is in front of them, coupled with their contempt for the certainties of black-and-white thinking, makes for a truthful depiction of the world. As John Dewey notes, “compartmentalization of occupations and interests brings about separation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from thought and doing. “How to Work Better” exhibits the artists’ decades-long laboratory of real-world testing — and their discovery that levity and profundity are not so far apart.

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December 22, 2015 to January 30, 2016
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, (215) 629-1000

The process of drawing is an excursion through ideas, a means by which an artist can test out theories and apply one surface to another, without the commitment of three-dimensional materials. Joan Tanner, whose large-scale installations are like a chess game played with limitless pieces, experiments in equally compelling ways in her drawings.

In the same way that stories are made of words that we recognize, a sculpture is made of materials that can come with meanings. When those materials are themselves complete objects, the reading of the piece is hemmed in by its components’ known uses in society. An artist can put these parts together in challenging or ironic ways, but she cannot completely ignore prior functions.

A drawing, however, is more slippery. Line can merely suggest meanings and not have to contain them. Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, a line holds whatever meaning the beholder assigns it. One calls it a live creature, another, a finger puppet. Tanner’s drawings make ample use of the medium’s ambiguities, suggesting a wide range of possibilities but never constraining us to a single reading.

Ambiguity of scale is a major tool in Tanner’s box. Donotellmewhereibelong #32 (2014), for example, is an accumulation of fine lines on a smudge of blue chalk in the midst of a white page. The lines coalesce into a central form that could be as large as a rock hollow in the side of a cliff or as small as a side of fleshy tissues under a microscope. Never fully divorced from the flat surface, these marks dissolve into a crisscross pattern on the form’s periphery.

Endofred #3 introduces ambiguity of viewpoint as a modus operandi. Thick red oil stick splotches cover undulating lines that resemble winding rivers viewed from above. Envisioned in profile, this same set of marks is a grotesque rooster hopping on one foot, or a cloud of debris kicked up by a small tornado. These very different readings coexist within a remarkably cohesive composition.

Tanner’s marks often straddle the line between the mimetic and the schematic. She freely mixes lines that suggest form and surface with others that resemble an architect’s plans. Donotellmewhereibelong #19 (2014), for example, contains a thicket of ruled graphite lines that converge in the manner of the orthogonal foci of perspective diagrams. Covered with smudges of turquoise and green, however, these triangular configurations also suggest a bay full of sailboats and waves. Tilting toward the side of an otherwise white page, this entire nautical configuration appears to drift into outer space.

The frequent appearance of a lonely clump of matter in the midst of a void lends a kind of alien spaceship aspect to the work. However, the drawings’ fierce openness keeps them out of the sci-fi illustration territory of, say, Roger Dean’s Yes album cover art. At once flat and pictorial, and seen simultaneously in plan and elevation views, these drawings have too many complications to be illustrative.

The openness of Tanner’s graphic work relates to the working process she uses for her sculptures and installations. An online video of her assembly of the piece On Tenderhooks (2006) shows a flurry of activity, with assistants bringing objects into the gallery, rolling them around, nailing them together, taking them apart, then removing them altogether. Along the way, Tanner traces all possibilities inherent in the form, in the same way that we as viewers run through many alternative readings as we engage with her drawings. The topsy-turvy orientation of this exhibition’s various pieces is equivalent to the drawings’ ambiguous scale and viewpoint, and the choice to omit elements resonates with the drawings’ vast voids. Tanner demonstrates a comparable level of persistence in the making of her three-dimensional work and her drawings, albeit of a different kind. The one involves hitting the same path repeatedly until she arrives at her destination; the other, hitting every path until she finds the right one. It is not surprising, therefore, that her drawings encompass a level of openness impossible in the more resolutely determined works.

The post The Shadows in Plato’s Cave: Drawings by Joan Tanner appeared first on artcritical.

Frank Bramblett: No Intention at the Woodmere Art Museum

March 7 to June 21, 2015
9210 Germantown Avenue
Philadelphia, PA, 215 247 0476

Attention art materials: if you see Frank Bramblett coming, run! Through four decades of work, the Philadelphia-based artist has slashed, sanded, and frozen his way through pools of paint, loads of marble dust, and acres of canvas. The results he has achieved are on display in the exhibition “No Intention,” at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum through June 21.

I take issue with the exhibition’s title, as it suggests a lack of direction. From his arrival in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, Bramblett has shown a clear intent with every piece he made — but sidestepped the conventional application of brush to canvas. In early works such as Red Wrap (1973), for example, the artist poured acrylic paint into a frame to create both the illusion and the reality of an undulating surface. Shiny pools of paint form a light-to-dark brown gradient that resembles the humps of a Naugahyde couch. The artist took this pour method to extremes in White Face (1974), burying a layered pool of paint in the snow and snapping its frozen edges. The resulting fissures revealed thin, colored lines that frame a buckling white field. Like Jo Baer’s paintings from the early 1970s, Bramblett’s pour paintings push the action from center to extremity.

In pieces such as FeO (1977) Bramblett heaped minerals onto the painted surface, loaded his paint with ferrous oxide sand and scraped it across the canvas in razor-sharp diagonals. The resulting charcoal-gray grit pushes past the edges of the panel support, making the canvas resemble a slab of chipped slate, blurring the line between sculpture and painting.

During the 1980s, Bramblett’s small, abstract work turned large and figurative. Oh No Yoko! Where What Where (1982) filled an entire wall with a frieze-like progression of bodies borrowed from myth and art history. We move through Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864), Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), and Matisse’s Dance (1910) — all laboriously cut from linoleum tiles of varying patterns and colors. It would be tempting to say that in this stage Bramblett was drawn into a trendy post-modern phalanx of appropriation, pattern and decoration, and pop cultural fetish. A closer look reveals that the Bramblett’s labor-intensive “destruction-as-creation” practices from the ‘70s continued to be the driving force in his work. Instead of applying paint to a surface, he applied one surface to another, cheerfully breaking mirrors into shards and cutting hard tiles into precise shapes in order to build a material object.

More recent works embrace the large scale but shift the narrative from grand themes to personal experience. Holes in Dive In (2001) reveal small sea or lakeside photographs showing endless expanses of pebbles and rivulets of water. These tiny windows into natural topography are engulfed by a broad field (90 x 72 inches) of meandering parallel lines made by running a comb-like instrument through a thick layer of pink paint. There is an almost seamless continuity between the photographic documentations of nature and Bramblett’s simulations of the same.

The traditional attitude toward paint is to view regard it as plastic — i.e. a formless substance ready to take on whatever characteristics the painter gives it. Although Bramblett certainly puts his paint and canvas through boot camp, in the end he lets them decide what they will be. Rather than lack of intention, his approach is a confidence that the materials have become so infused with his personality that they tell his story on their own.

The post Going with the Flow: Frank Bramblett at the Woodmere appeared first on artcritical.

January 8 through February 14, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

Years ago I watched a puzzling documentary about a Billy Graham crusade in Brazil. A shot of a plane towing an advertisement for the event over a beach crowded with half-naked bodies left me wondering what attraction evangelical Christianity had in this land of exuberant physicality. Apparently plenty, as shown in Yael Bartana’s film Inferno, on view along with True Finn at Petzel in New York (January 8-February 15, 2015). Together, these works challenge conventional ideas of how people of a certain nationality are expected to behave.

On the border of fiction and documentary, Inferno (2013) re-enacts ancient Hebrew temple worship, using a full-scale replica of the Temple of Solomon created in Brazil by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). Worshippers dressed in white linen faux-biblical costume and led by a flamboyantly-attired Black high priest gather at the site. Helicopters swoop in to deliver an altar and giant golden menorah, similar to the one carried off by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago.

The devoted flock that arrived with goats and chickens to offer to God soon discover that they are to be the sacrifice. Suddenly the Temple is engulfed in flame, killing most of the participants. After the conflagration, the film re-enacts modern times, where the faithful place notes in a replica of the ruined Temple wall while tourists sip cold drinks from menorah-emblazoned melons.

If Inferno tells the story of one culture planting another within its borders — a kind of Disneyland Jerusalem within Brazil — True Finn (2014) tells the story of people planting a culture within themselves. Created by Bartana for the Finnish contemporary art festival Ihme, this film records the results of a gathering arranged by the artist, in which she asked several naturalized Finnish citizens to discuss what it means to be a “true” Finn. The event takes place at a lakeside cabin in the north — a kind of “holy of holies” for Finnish culture.

In the process of the experience, Finns of Japanese, Estonian, Somali, Quebecois and Roma descent reveal basic problems of citizenship in the modern world. Discussing discrimination, one begins, “I feel like a Finn, I’ve lived here a long time, but when I go into a shop…” The group then enacts a scene of discrimination. Bartana further captures the ironies of outsider status by intermingling footage from classic films that embody national mythology. We see blond-haired, blue-eyed Finns in folk costume from the film Sampo (1959), and then cut to the darker-skinned Somali participant Mustafe wearing the same outfit. Later Mustafe dons Muslim garb as he offers daily prayers in the midst of the frozen lake.

Participants engage in typical Finnish activities: eating hearty stews and lingonberry sauce, ice fishing, sitting in the sauna. They cite adopted habits, e.g. “sulking” and “wearing black” as evidence that they have been integrated into the culture. They compose a new national anthem for their country and design a new flag, exchanging Finland’s severe dark blue cross for flowing bands of white, azure and green against a yellow background.

Bartana’s videos get to the heart of the problem of citizenship and culture in a democratic society. If, to become a part of a nation, one need only pledge allegiance to its laws, how can we say that one person more authentically of that place than another? If an Estonian, a Roma, and a Quebecois absorb the trappings of Finnish culture and learn to speak its language, shouldn’t Finland absorb them? And conversely, if a group in Brazil builds its own Jerusalem, how can we consider it less authentic than the one in the middle east?

The post A House of Prayer for All People: Yael Bartana at Petzel appeared first on artcritical.

Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

November 14, 2014 to April 12, 2015
118 North Broad Street (between Race and Arch streets)
Philadelphia, 215 972 7600

A walk through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ exhibition of work by Peter Blume (1906 – 1992) is like a tour through 20^th century art. Precisionism, Surrealism, abstraction, and Pop art all have their moment in the painting and drawing of this lesser-known American artist, who is now getting his due with the Academy’s retrospective “Nature and Metamorphosis.” The accompanying catalogue, with excellent essays by Sarah Vure, Samantha Baskind and curator Robert Cozzolino, offers engaging insights into Blume’s particular brand of Modernism.

The confidence of Blume’s hand is striking. Whether rendering a stark winter farmhouse, a war catastrophe, or a pile of improvised biomorphic forms, the artist always knows exactly where to end one shape end and begin another. In the painting New England Barn (1926), for example, barn, farmhouse, and shed are joined by the up-down rhythm of repeated triangles. In a classic Cubist ploy, the edge of one background building merges with that of a horse cart in the foreground, confounding the expected spatial reading. Not so classically Cubist is a female figure in the hayloft, who has apparently bared her flesh for the cart driver’s pleasure. Unabashed sexual moments like this one recur frequently in Blume’s work, preventing its reading as pure form.

Blume’s take on the industrial subject matter of the Precisionists also involves unexpected insertions. Parade (1928) depicts the same type of ship ventilators as in Charles Sheeler’s familiar painting Upper Deck (1929), but Blume’s extreme dislocations of space and nonsensical additions (including a suit of armor) resemble the Surrealism of Max Ernst. Such insertions are both the strength and the problem of Blume’s work. He brushed aside associations with all movements, including André Breton’s attempt to identify him as a Surrealist: “They wanted me to join the club. I told them that was hopeless.” Yet in striking out on his own, he never quite found his own voice. Color palettes bounced from muted grays and whites to warm earth tones. Levels of detail varied from the minimal to the chock-full — as in The Eternal City (1934-37), an allegory of fascism that seems to contain every stone in Italy.

Like many artists of the era, Blume was deeply affected by the Second World War, and his confrontation with that conflict’s horrors spurred experimentation. In The Eternal City, his insertion of the bright-green head of Mussolini amid piles of equally bright-red bricks announced a willingness to try out-of-the-tube colors. Drawing also took Blume in new directions. A series of untitled ink doodles from 1946 used the automatic drawing technique favored by Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, improvising biomorphic forms with pen and brush. Much more diffuse than the paintings, these inventions find their way into later works with compelling results.

A notable example is Flowering Stump (begun in 1945 but completed in 1968). The floral forms that emerge from this stump resemble many things but nothing in particular: fungi, acorn squash, genitals, sting rays. An automatic charcoal study that accompanied this piece clearly helped Blume imbue his work with such free-floating associations. Another pivotal piece, House at Falling Water (begun 1938, completed 1968), is possibly the strangest image ever of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece. The intensely detailed plant forms and tiny, waif-like hounds in the foreground command our attention, rendered as they are with the vibrating tonality of Ivan Albright’s mounds of undulating flesh. Meanwhile, Blume softened the house’s concrete slabs to the consistency of tofu.

The works completed in the 1970s and 1980s bring Blume’s de-familiarized bio-forms to their pinnacle. Piles of rocks in From the Metamorphosis (1979) freely transform themselves to toes, arms, breasts and buttocks. In Autumn (1984), a gaggle of squashes tilt to and fro with more excitement than is customary for vegetables, their ticklish stems resembling the business end of a sex toy. In each of these paintings, full-intensity background hues pop out in front of foreground blacks and grays, flattening the space and adding to the festive delirium of the scene. The elements that began in earlier works — Cubist dislocation of form, Surrealist transformation of scale and substance, the bizarre use of primary and high-contrast colors, and of course sexual innuendo — finally coalesce into a personal statement that, while referring to different types of Modern art, maintain its own integrity.

The post Bloom and Drang: Peter Blume’s Eclecticism appeared first on artcritical.

The Review Panel, in its last meeting in 2014, took place at the National Academy Museum on November 21. The line up of critics joining moderator David Cohen included veteran Lance Esplund and two newcomers to the program, Sarah Douglas and Edward M. Epstein (in his New York debut; Epstein is a regular of The Review Panel Philadelphia). The exhibitions discussed were “Ragnar Kjartansson and The National: A Lot of Sorrow” at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, “Marina Abramovic: The Generator” at Sean Kelly, “Tommy Hartung: The Bible” at On Stellar Rays, and “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Permeated Shield” at Galerie Lelong. The next panel takes place at the National Academy Friday, February 13, 2015.

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